Session 4-eBooks--CK12

In Session 3's 'Readings' in the syllabus, I had you read a little about CK-12. (Based upon a comment from one of you last session, you can get carried away exploring its resources.) They currently have mostly STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subject material, but their plan is to expand soon and include the humanities, arts, and material for primary students.  

There are many of you taking this course who teach in the latter subject areas, but if CK-12's model holds true, then they will have textbooks and workbooks in your disciplines w/i the next year or two.

Now you won't be taking this course in a year or two, so I'd like you to spend some time this week poring through CK-12's resources and practicing with the interface, so when that day comes you'll be the first one in your school to be using this great tool.

Let's start by watching this brief intro video that my friend Neeru put together recently to introduce herself and CK-12.




Now, in case you didn't get a chance to do the readings from last week or need a refresher, give their, 'About Us' page a skim now.  When you've finished I'd like you to read the most recent news articles about them from 2012.

You should be pretty excited and inspired about the possibilities at this point.  I was when I first learned about them in 2008.  I reached out to Neeru to explore building a collaboration and she flew me out to Silicon Valley in November '08 to meet with her, and her co-founder, about their work. I was so enthralled that I decided to add their resources to this course to help share their vision, and also to help contribute to the movement myself.

Imagine if our school districts began to use open education resources (OER) to 'collectively' write our own textbooks and curriculum material, and then began sharing them with each other. Sounds beyond reach doesn't it? But some systems and State Dept.'s of Education are trying just that. Read about Virginia for example. There's more about their plan here as well.  And those are almost four years old!

Now CK-12 just really began taking off around August of '08, so as I mentioned above, they don't have every discipline yet. But, like I said, they plan to broaden to other areas soon. Here's a brief demonstration to watch.

Introducing CK-12 Foundation's Digital Learning Tools - #2 from CK-12 Foundation on Vimeo.

Now if this all scares you a little or you feel a little intimidated---that's justified. I'm sure that you have a lot of questions. The biggest concern I hear is about the quality of the information. We'll go into more detail about that in the next few sessions, but for now think about how many teachers stray from the textbooks in their class and instead use quality, credible information that they have screened using their professional judgment.

Now think about how much information teachers have in their heads. If they took the time to write it out, and share it freely with the world, we would have a tremendously powerful tool.  I'd like you to spend the rest of your time trying to play with CK-12's Flexbooks. See if you can find one to use in your educational setting, and as I mentioned before, don't write it off so quickly b/c they don't have anything in your discipline or grade level just yet.  The practice today, will pay off tomorrow.

Let's start by viewing this quick start guide.

Now (if you haven't already) register on the site.  Here's how:

Now watch this tutorial and pause it regularly to see if you can follow her step by step:

Here comes the good part.  "Browsing" and "Searching"  Pause it as she goes through directions and try to recreate:

     

To be perfectly honest, most people just access and use these Flexbooks, rather than make changes to them to personalize things for their educational setting, so we're going to skip the editing and creating from scratch directions.  You can always check them out some day in the future with the links above (but you can watch them now if

All of this practice isn't good for much if you can't put the finishing touches on, and assemble, an eBook for yourself or your peers, so let's go through that and finish with the printing options.

Lastly, and most importantly, we have "Printing and Sharing".  Pay particularly close attention to the options here, b/c each one is useful in a different circumstance.  The 'sharing' is also a great addition that they've just begun to include in the CK12 options, so play with all of these options now and then we'll call it a day.

Good luck and as always please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.

Dave Fontaine

DaveFontaine1@gmail.com